Top-grade biosafety lab building spree planned in southern China

Guangdong province science chief says at least one facility will be able to handle the most infectious fatal diseases such as Ebola

The centres are needed ‘to cut the risks of transporting specimens and to strengthen diagnosis’

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The southern province of Guangdong is planning to build a string of biosafety labs. Photo: AFP

Published: 8:00pm, 25 May 2020Updated: 11:15pm, 25 May 2020

The southern Chinese province of Guangdong plans to build dozens of high-grade biosafety laboratories to handle some of the most infectious diseases in the next five years.

Wang Ruijun, director general of Guangdong’s Department of Science and Technology, said there was a shortage of such facilities in the province, and the plan was to build up to 30 biosafety level-3 (BSL-3) labs and at least one BSL-4 centre within five years, news site ThePaper.cn reported on Monday.

Laboratories are graded on a four-tier scale, with BSL-4 used to designate the highest-grade facilities that can house easily transmitted fatal pathogens, such as Ebola. The scale is also known as the P scale.

“The US has close to 1,500 BSL-3 labs, and almost all medical organisations or medical schools have them. But, China lacks high-level biosafety labs, especially in Guangdong,” Wang was quoted as saying on the sidelines of the “two sessions”, China’s annual gathering of its political elite.

There are only two BSL-4 labs in China – the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Harbin Veterinary Research Institute. Guangdong has five BSL-3 labs, and no BSL-4 labs.

A BSL-3 lab in Guangzhou worked with a team led by respiratory disease expert Zhong Nanshan to isolate the pandemic coronavirus from human specimens and conduct vaccine experiments.